Archangel (33 page)

it's not my business what happens to Michael Holly.'

'I came to say that we hope we can free him, not immediately, not tomorrow . .. but we hope it will be soon.'

'You haven't been listening, Mr Millet. We were divorced. Our lives have separated.'

The tiredness billowed through Millet. He started to unbutton his raincoat.

'I just thought you'd want to know.'

'You came here just to tell me that?'

'For Christ's sake .. .' Millet's hand hit the table. The food bowls jarred, a glass wobbled above a narrow stem. 'I thought it might mean something. I thought. . . I'm sorry.'

He stood up and started for the door.

She waved him back to the fchair. The tears were bright on her cheeks.

'You couldn't understand, Mr Millet.'

'I thought you'd want to know.'

'I shall never see Holly again. I didn't want that. Holly said it. Holly said I would never see him again. Listen to me, Mr Millet. Don't interrupt...'

Her head was in her hands and she spoke through the fingers that spread across her face.

'I won't interrupt.'

i went to the divorce hearing. 1 don't know why I went. I suppose a woman has a tidy mind and wants to see something through, see it settled and final. I was to have gone with a friend, but she cried off in the morning, rang me just before I was due to leave the flat. I went on my own. I'd never thought he'd be there, and if I'd considered for a moment that he would be there, then I'd never have gone myself. If you didn't realize, Mr Millet, it's a pretty stark occasion. The court was just about empty, and there were only the two of us in the public bit. Two of us, and we sat at opposite ends of a great long bench, and there was a mile of cold polished wood between us. It doesn't last long, it's an express job - that way it's cheap - and we never looked at each other all the time that the bloody lawyers droned away.

I didn't take in a word that was said. It was so stupid; I was at my own divorce hearing and all I wanted to do was to run the length of that bench and hold onto him, hold him and say that it was ridiculous, that it wasn't happening to us, and that we should go home. We never looked at each other, not once. I didn't look at him, I just loved him. I loved him, Mr Millet, loved him with a mile of polished bloody wood between us. At the end, he stood up and I stood up, and he went out fast and I went slowly. I walked out of the Court, and I was a free woman and I was blubbering like a baby. I don't know why, I don't usually do it, I went across the Strand and into the first pub I saw, and I went up to the bar and ordered a double something, and I found a seat and sat down. I sat down next to Holly. Shit.. . can you see that, Mr Millet? I sat down next to him. He was crying. I suppose that's why there was a seat beside him in the pub, I mean, nobody wants to sit next to a grown man who is crying. And we couldn't help each other. We just sat there, and sipped our drinks, and bloody cried. And it was too l a t e . . . too late for both of us. He went and bought me a pork pie, a horrible thing, all fatty, and he said that he had never cried in his life before, at least not since he was a small child. He held my hand and he told me that nobody would ever see him cry again. He said that if he ever saw me again, I would make him cry. All the time that he spoke he held my hand, he squeezed it so that it hurt first and then was white and numbed. Something in him died that day, Mr Millet. It wasn't all my fault, you know. He killed it himself, but something died. Perhaps it was the will to love that died.

Perhaps it was the dependence on another living and breathing soul that died. If he comes home or if he stays in the place where he is now, still that death will be final. I could never meet him again, I could never bear to see him cry again. It's taken me three years to try to lose the memory of Holly weeping. I'll never lose it, Mr Millet. Holly will never cry again, he'll never love again . .. Suddenly he stood up, and his beer wasn't finished and his pie wasn't eaten and he wiped his sleeve across his face as if nobody was looking and half the pub was, and he waved to me as if we'd only known each other for half an hour and he walked out through the door. So you see, Mr Millet, Holly is none of my business.

The man that I knew is dead, dead in his tears.'

Millet stood up.

i hope I haven't spoiled your party.'

'What was it worth?' Mikk Laas asked.

it was worth nothing,' Holly said.

'Does freedom have a rare taste?'

'For me it had nothing.'

'To have gone through the wire you must have believed in that freedom?'

'And not found it.'

'On the outside, you saw people?'

'Not until the helicopter came.'

'You saw the face of no man who was free?'

'The first face I saw was that of the helicopter marksman.'

'Was it luck that beat you?'

it was inevitable.'

'The escape was wasted?'

it was lunatic, we were exhausted, we were hungry, we had nowhere to go.' Holly said bitterly. 'I hadn't thought it out. I hadn't reckoned on the tiredness. I told Adimov that I had thought I would find an excitement when we were clear of the wire, a great breath of fresh excitement, and I felt nothing. Once you hear the siren there is no freedom. Out of the little camp and into the big camp, that's what they say, isn't it? Near my country is Ireland, they have a sport there that they call "coursing". They release a hare and the fastest dogs they have chase it. For the hare there is a moment of something like freedom because it can run. But the dogs are faster. The hare has only a moment of freedom, and its freedom is spent with the blood spurting in its heart. That's not freedom, Mikk Laas.'

'Others before you have tried, others after you will try.'

'Then they're better men.'

'And now you will bend to them?'

'They drag it out of you, don't they? They drag the guts and bowels out of you. You start by trying to fight. You run against a wall, you beat your head against their bricks. You kick, you punch the wall, but you cannot hurt the bricks.

I've tried . . . '

'How have you tried?'

Michael Holly looked across the narrow width of the SHIzo cell towards the old Estonian. They had not talked the previous evening, but morning now, the morning after recapture, and he could talk. But he felt an impatience at the veteran's bleak questions. He felt the requirement of justification.

'I burned down the Commandant's hut.'

'You did that?' Mikk Laas nodded, an academic's approval.

'I did that. I poisoned the garrison water supply.'

'That too?'

'I escaped, I cut through their bloody wire.'

- 'And now you will bend to them?'

' I . . . I don't know . . . '

'Have you achieved anything by the burning, the poisoning, the escape? Anything of value?'

'You tell me.'

'Time alone will tell you. Perhaps you have lit some fire in the camp.'

'Did I have the right to do those things, Mikk Laas?' He thought of a man taken to Yavas to face capital trial, a man whom he had never seen.

'When we were last together you spoke of reprisal, I remember. If at the end, Michael Holly, you have won a victory, then you were justified. If now you bend the knee to them, then you have no right to do those things.'

'Thank you, Mikk Laas.'

An incredible old man. In the camps from before the time Holly was born. An old fighter, an old idiot, who did not know when to bend to them. Not a spare pinch of flesh on his body, and he had strength to give away. He had never met a man like Mikk Laas before. He had to travel a thousand miles inside the frontiers of the big camp to find him. Holly squeezed the frail fingers in affection.

A warder unbolted the door of the cell and dumped inside a bucket and a broom of bound twigs. They should slop out and clean the cell, and after that Mikk Laas would go to the workshop and Michael Holly would be taken to the office of the Political Officer. The door slammed shut.

Holly was on his knees picking up the dirt between his forefinger and thumb.

'There is a man at Yavas who will die because I poisoned the water.'

'Only a victory can balance that man's life.'

An old voice, a voice that shuffled between the close walls of the cell.

It is not easy to administer with success the daily life of an organism as complex as a prison camp.

The traditional way, the way of the Commandants of the Dubrovlag, is the iron-gloved routine. In theory the weight of repression and penalty is sufficient to make the inmates accept their demi-life behind the fences. For a thousand days, or ten thousand days, the tough way will ensure a pliability from the zeks. Short of food, short of rest, short of dignity, the prisoners will seek the one course that will permit their survival. They will strive above all to live. But one day, they refuse to lie down before the steam-roller wheel of camp routine. From the offices of senior officials of the Ministry of Interior in far away and comfortable Moscow right down to the stink of the living huts in the camps, there is no known science to explain those few and long separated moments when the prisoners' tolerance of their condition is overwhelmed.

At the camp with the designated title of ZhKh 385/3/1

that one day - the day that follows a thousand, the day that follows ten thousand - was a Tuesday in the last week of February.

A report now rests in the basement filing library of the Ministry of the Interior, compiled from laborious interviews with Vasily Kypov, Yuri Rudakov, an assortment of officers and NCOs under their command, trusties from Internal Order, and senior warders. The report seeks to explain the events that were linked, in Zone 1 of Camp 3, on a Tuesday in the last week of the month of February, with the name of Michael Holly.

Michael Holly, however, cannot be directly related to the initial action on that Tuesday morning - that point was to be most precisely made by the Ministry's senior official who was to be the final author and arbiter of the report. Michael Holly was isolated in the SHIzo punishment block with only a senile Estonian for company. But his name was spoken often on that Tuesday morning. Men conjured with that name, took it as a faith's cross, whispered it as a healing herb. Around the camp was a low wooden fence, and then a killing zone, and then two fences of barbed wire, and then a high wooden fence. Around the camp were watch-towers, guards, guns, dogs. Around the camp was an impasse of snow emptiness. Behind those barriers, in spite of those barriers, a defiance was born. On that Tuesday morning an anger fluttered, a spirit tickled and, in ways that could sometimes be touched and that were at other moments intangible, the name of Michael Holly grasped at the consciousness of the prisoners. There are many errors in the report of the Ministry of the Interior, but when the heavy typewritten sheets point to the central position of Michael Holly they do not lie.

On that Tuesday morning from his bunk in Hut 2, Anatoly Feldstein declared that he had begun a hunger strike,

When the body is semi-starved, when the diet provides sufficient calories and protein only to keep the prisoner as a working creature, then a hunger strike is no easy weapon for a man to take with his fist.

Feldstein lay on his mattress and the hut around him was quiet. All the zeks had gone for exercise and breakfast, and then for roll-call before the march to the Factory zone. The trustie was the last who had spoken to him, sworn at him, cursed him.

Not an easy weapon to hold, the self-denial of food. But he had seen a man jump down from the cabin of a helicopter on the previous evening, a man who had crawled in the snow to slice through the strands of wire that bound them all to the compound, a man who had run before the hunting troops with the scream of the siren betraying his action, a man who had carried his friend, a man who had managed to wave to the zeks who watched his home-coming.

He had seen a man who had fought back.

Bukovsky, Orlov, Shcharansky, Kuznetsov — they were in the folklore of the dissident fighters. Bukovsky had led the hunger strike at Perm 35. Orlov, who was in Perm 37 and shadowed even in the camp by two KGB officers, alternated between hunger strike and the SHIzo punishment cell.

Scharansky, while in the hard Christopol gaol, had organized a ten-day strike in solidarity with 'the Peoples struggling against Russia-Soviet Imperialism and Colonialism'.

Kuznetsov had not compromised even under the sentence of death. They were the cream, they were the leaders who were known beyond the borders of their country. Anatoly Feldstein was a minnow in their company.

He had been serving out his time, whiling away the months of his captivity. He had been in the SHIzo just once, for failing to remove his cap in the presence of an officer. He had dreamed of an exile in the West. The Englishman had nudged his guilt. Where before he had seen no value in confrontation, he now saw its worth. When he had passed the samizdat writings in Moscow he had known of the penalties, he had told Michael Holly that he knew of them.

Now, as he lay on his mattress, he thought of the further penalties that he would face.

Let the bastards come. When you have nothing, what then can be taken from you? This was his gesture . . .

Four men around the bunk. Two warders with truncheons drawn, the trustie who had brought them, Captain Yuri Rudakov because Feldstein was political.

'Get up, you little Jew shit,' from the first warder.

'Off your arse before we kick you off,' from the second warder.

'Why are you not at roll-call, Feldstein?' A coldness from Rudakov.

Words hammering around Feldstein's ears, and he felt small and vulnerable and beneath the swing of their fists and truncheons he waited for the blows.

'I declare a hunger strike in protest against the violation of my constitutional rights . . . '

it's not like you to be stupid, Feldstein . . . '

The boy saw the beginning of puzzlement on Rudakov's forehead, as if the Political Officer were weighted by another preoccupation.

in addition to a hunger strike I declare a work strike in protest against the labour conditions of the camp, which are illegal under Soviet law because they contravene Soviet safety standards.'